


Wing-Head's Twitter Conundrum

by Muccamukk



Category: Marvel 3490
Genre: Coming Out, Everyone is Queer, F/M, Fluff, Identity Porn, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Social Media
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 07:15:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20926247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Natasha is probably not the person Steve should have come to with this problem.





	Wing-Head's Twitter Conundrum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lets_call_me_Lily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lets_call_me_Lily/gifts).

> As per my usual, this 3490 AU assumes that things went more or less the same as early 616, but is set in the 21st-century. Therefore Steve does not know Natasha Stark and Iron Man are the same person, and social media exists.
> 
> Thanks to Sineala for helping me plot this out.

Natasha knew Cap was buttering her up when he brought Iron Man's favourite smoothie down to the lab. 

"Thanks, Wing-head," she said, and opened the mouth plate of her helmet enough to get the straw in. Avocado mango. Cap really was her favourite person on earth.

Cap rubbed the back of his neck, leaned one hip against Natasha's bench, then stood up straight and pushed his cowl back off his head, leaving his hair standing at odd angles. He'd been sweating under the suit, presumably from jogging back from the smoothie place. Natasha wondered if some day she'd know what Cap looked like covered in perspiration from another sort of exertion, but the way her luck was going, it didn't seem likely. She kept dropping by the mansion out of costume, and Cap kept making red-faced excuses not to be there. She couldn't tell if it was awkwardness around women, or if Cap just didn't like Natasha Stark the way he seemed to like Iron Man.

When Cap didn't say anything, Natasha flipped her helmet closed so the voice distorter would kick back in. "Something eating you, Steve?"

"Yeah," Cap said. Then paused. He seemed to be debating telling her the rest, probably the latest round in a long-standing internal argument that had carried him all the way to get his buddy's favourite treat and all the way back.

"You know I'd do anything I can for you, pal," Natasha tried. "You just have to spit it out."

"I know, I know," Cap said. He rubbed his face and seemed to settle on a choice. "You seen any social media in the last hour or so?"

"Can't use my phone with my gauntlets on," Natasha said, and suppressed the urge to pull up her feeds on the HUD. She'd muted them to get some work done, but now... "What's up?"

Steve folded his arms, which managed to look more like he was hugging himself than he was trying to be defensive. "Maybe this is more of a problem for Ms. Stark."

"I can ask her, if it is," Natasha said. She knew she had a good reason for keeping Iron Man and Ms. Stark separated, but damn if it didn't get complicated sometimes. She wanted another sip of that smoothie, possibly with a shot of whiskey in it, if the conversation was going to be something that needed this much hedging. "Come on, Cap, lay it on me."

"I might have broken Twitter," Cap said.

Natasha blinked. Despite the social media reference, that was not what she'd been expecting. "Broke it how?"

Cap sighed, a short burst of breath through his nose. His cheeks were starting to colour and he looked like he was reconsidering the whole conversation, but he didn't back down this time. "I said some things, and some other people reacted, and then a lot of other people reacted, and then the site stopped loading."

"Oh," Natasha said. "So the servers overloaded?"

Cap shrugged. Jan had talked him through getting his Twitter, and frankly Natasha thought this was a Jan sort of problem. However, it wasn't like she was ever going to turn Steve Rogers away from her door. "I guess that's what happened," Cap said. "I haven't looked in a while. There were a lot of people writing in only capital letters before it broke, and it was a bit overwhelming, to be honest."

Natasha could only imagine. "So do you want Ms. Stark's help getting the site back up, or dealing with all the yelling?" she asked. Frankly she didn't think she'd be much help on either front.

"Both?" Steve said. "I guess."

"Steve," Natasha said, trying to figure out how to put this back onto Jan. "I don't think you need to do anything about Twitter. They'll probably get more server space and it'll come back in a few hours, if it's not back already."

Cap looked relieved. "Oh, that's good. Do you think ignoring the yelling until it stops will work too? In the old days, the press would leave you alone after a while if you didn't say anything. Mostly."

If only it were that easy. Natasha mentally pulled on her big girl panties and said, "It depends what you said."

"That's what I thought," Cap said. He'd slowly been sliding down the bench as his shoulders slumped until he looked like a cartoon drawing of a dejected little boy. Natasha wondered if he wanted a hug, and cursed the suit for not being very good for that kind of thing. She did the best she could by putting her gauntlet on his shoulder. Cap reached up and covered her hand with his, and Natasha told herself that the gauntlet's temperature sensors telling her about the warmth leeching through his glove was the same as actually feeling it.

"Pretty bad, huh?" Natasha asked.

"It wasn't my best moment," Cap agreed. "I lose my temper sometimes."

"I hadn't noticed," Natasha lied. "Guess that's why Iron Man's twitter is run by a Stark Industries intern named Haamid."

"What?" Cap demanded. "But you followed me! Ms. Stark followed me too!"

"Both Haamid," Natasha said. There had been a vote by the board about the control of employee social media, and Natasha had lost by a landslide.

"Huh," Cap said. "I guess that's why you didn't know about any of this when you liked my first tweet."

"Which was?" Natasha asked, finally starting to run out of patience.

"I just wished everyone Happy National Coming Out Day," Cap said. "To be supportive. You know. And then I favourited a couple of tweets by LGBTQQAI2S+ organisations." He actually said all the letters of the acronym out loud.

Natasha had a sudden and vivid image of how the entirety of the scenario had played out. "And then someone asked if you were gay."

Cap frowned. "That wasn't the word he used."

"Of course it wasn't."

"So I said that I was still catching up with the correct terminology, but that I'd appreciate it if people didn't use language like that when they were talking to me. Or anyone else."

"Of course you did."

"Well, and then I said that since it was coming out day, well..." Cap trailed off and looked at her appealingly.

"Wait, what?" Natasha said. Had Cap... was Cap... Christ, no wonder he didn't want to spend a lot of time with her as Nat Stark. "Did you just come out? On Twitter? And then broke it?"

"Yeah," Cap said, resigned. "I'm sorry. I meant to say something to the team first,"

Natasha struggled to find some possible high ground, pushing aside her choking disappointment. Cap hadn't said what he'd come out _as_, but she was pretty sure that people back in the 1940s had had a pretty binary view of these things. For a moment, she wondered if Cap might be interested in Iron Man, even if he wasn't interested in Natasha, but she couldn't see that getting very far. "It's not really our business," she said.

"You're all right with it, aren't you?" Cap asked earnestly. "I know Ms. Stark is open about about being bisexual, and I guess assumed that if you worked for her, that... and the whole team acts like it's not a big deal these days." Nat could feel his muscles tensing, like he was bracing himself for a fight.

"Ms Stark is out," Natasha said, glad the voice distortion that made her sound like a man also hid some of the sourness in her tone, "because the paparazzi caught her in bed with Sunset Bain when Nat was seventeen."

"Oh," Cap said, and Natasha was glad that at least someone on Earth hadn't heard all the gory details of that one. Even if the only reason he hadn't was that he'd been inside an iceberg at the time. "But you're okay with that. I mean me. Being out."

"Of course," Natasha said. Utterly and entirely disappointed, but not in the least upset. "Like I said, you can always come to me if you need to talk, Wing-head."

Cap nodded. He made himself stand straight and squeezed Natasha's gauntlet before stepping back. "Any advice for what to do, then?"

Natasha shrugged, the suit telegraphing the movement as a twitch and a creak of the joints. She tried to remember what Howard had done after the 'exposure,' but it'd mostly involved a very long ski trip to Patagonia. "Uh, you'll probably have to do an interview with a respectable media outlet, and put together a bigger blocklist. Ms Stark can hook you up with SI's media people."

"Thanks, Shell-head." Cap grinned, and Natasha's heart melted into her boots. "Say, what are you working on down here, anyway?"

Natasha started to tell him about her planned upgrades to the Avengers' comm systems. Cap leaned in to look, his shoulder brushing hers, and Natasha soaked in his presence. It wasn't that much of a disappointment, she told herself. It wasn't like someone like Steve Rogers was ever going to go out with someone like Nat Stark anyway. They might get along like a house on fire as Captain America and Iron Man, but as Nat and Steve, they were just too different.

With only half her attention on Cap and her explanation, Natasha didn't notice that she'd reached for the smoothie and started to flip open the port in her helmet until it was almost too late. Steve glanced at her as she stopped talking abruptly and took a long drink. It was starting to warm to room temperature and she should finish it. She needed to work out a better masker so that she could hide her voice and eat at the same time. This would be easier if the suit matched her gender, but she'd never known how to do that other than putting boobs on the damn thing. Everyone had just _assumed_ the first generation was a man, and explaining it seemed like it would sabotage the secret. Even if people just worked out that Iron Man was a woman, that would make connecting the dots to Natasha Stark too easy.

"You sure put a lot of work into this," Cap said admiringly, he clearly didn't understand how the technology actually worked, but he was picking up the tactical advantages of the new system as fast as she explained them.

"This team means a lot to me," Natasha said. "It means a lot to Ms. Stark, too."

"I should get to know Ms Stark," Cap admitted, not sounding especially sincere. "I guess I find her a bit intimidating."

Natasha wanted to say that she wasn't so bad once you go to know her, but didn't quite have the gall. "You'll get your chance with this interview thing," she said. "I'm sure she'll be happy to help."

"Right." Cap didn't sound too enthusiastic about that either, but he was probably back to thinking about the capslock Twitter meltdown.

"It'll blow over," Natasha said. Out of morbid curiosity, she pulled up her social media aggregator and checked to see if Twitter's servers had recovered. They had. The first thing she saw was that Haamid had retweeted Cap's final post onto both Natasha Stark's and Iron Man's accounts, each time accompanied by a thumbs up and a rainbow flag emoji.

> I'm still trying to understand the right words to use too, but I'm interested in romantic relationships with all genders. Call it what you like, but don't be mean.

"You think so?" Cap asked.

Behind the armour, Natasha smiled. "Eventually."


End file.
